Capitalism, largely through its historic oppression of minority workers and nationalities, has been able to maintain its hold over the whole working class.
Capitalism in the U.S. arose on the basis of the slave trade of Black people, the massacre of Native Americans and the conquest of the Southwest from Mexico.
The 200-year history of chauvinism and national oppression in the U.S. has been a heavy anchor on the working-class movement from its very beginnings. It prompted Karl Marx to say: “Labor in the white skin can never be free while in the black skin it is branded.”
The national question has always been central to the work of revolutionaries and communists. This has been especially true since the birth of the U.S. trade union movement and the rise of capitalism into its monopoly stage when Black and white workers were drawn together into the industrial struggle.
Whenever communists have been able to play a leading role within the trade union movement, the workers’ struggle has been directed against the bosses’ policies of divide and rule, and the labor movement has taken giant strides forward. But whenever revisionists and reformist trade union leaders have been able to effectively promote white chauvinism and abandon the struggles of “labor in the black skin,” the unions have been weakened and kept under the thumb of the bosses.
For communists today, the significance of this history cannot be overlooked. The unions have been laid open to capitalist attacks largely because of the chauvinist policies of the labor lieutenants who run them. The great majority of U.S. workers are still unorganized primarily because of the treacherous record of the labor misleaders in the South and Southwest, the historic areas of national oppression of the Black and Chicano peoples.
The labor lieutenants have been loyal servants of the capitalists in helping to maintain the oppression of the Black Belt nation in the South and the Chicano national minority in the Southwest because it is in their interest to do so. In order for these traitors to protect their rule over the organized labor movement and consequently over the labor movement as a whole, the misleaders promote divisions along national lines and actively fight to exclude the vast majority of minority nationality workers from the trade unions.
Along with their defense of national oppression, the trade union bureaucrats lend their support to U.S. imperialism’s exploitation of third world nations and peoples and to all forms of great-nation chauvinism. They try to pit U.S. workers against foreign-born and third world workers, blaming them for unemployment and the general crisis of capitalism.
Because they are bribed with the superprofits which come from imperialism’s plunder of the third world, the labor lieutenants have a vested interest in protecting this system and promoting chauvinism among the people.
Their support for U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico is a clear example. They have launched chauvinist attacks on Puerto Rican workers*and the independence movement, and maneuvered to extend their own colonial rule over the island’s labor movement through their so-called “international” unions.
On the fight against Klan terror, school segregation, deportation of foreign-born workers and other key questions, these bribed agents of capitalism in the unions have played an equally traitorous role. Refusing to take up the fight against discrimination, the trade union bureaucrats violently attack the special demands of minorities. “To say that we’ve got to sacrifice our kids,” said AFL-CIO boss George Meany on Labor Day, “to take care of people who merely say they’ve got to be employed because their skin is black, that is discrimination in reverse.”
The commitment of the labor aristocrats to white supremacy and against working-class unity can be seen regularly in their efforts to maintain the status quo through the very structure of the seniority system. While protecting the workers from arbitrary firings and downgrading, the seniority system is also used by the companies and union leaders to systematically exclude minority workers from the better jobs.
The labor lieutenants pit the interests of a small handful of privileged workers against the interests of the vast majority and claim that any step toward ending discrimination would be at the expense of the white workers. Nothing is further from the truth.
From the very beginnings of the labor movement, white labor was forced to compete with Black slave labor. The exclusion of minority workers from the unions and the skilled trades and their confinement to the lowest-paying and worst jobs have been used to keep down the wages and working conditions of the entire working class.
Movements such as the communist-led CIO organizing drives in the 1920s based themselves largely on the force of the millions of unorganized Black workers who, standing at the bottom of the whole mountain of class oppression, could not help but deal a powerful blow to capitalism in their effort to liberate themselves. Linking the tight for social equality with the union demands, the then-revolutionary Communist Party (CPUSA) was able to forge a spirit of militant unity among the workers.
Communist-led organizations, like the Trade Union Education League, and struggles such as the meatpackers strike of 1917-18 gave support and encouragement to the general movement for Black liberation. Mass marches were led by communists from the packing-houses in Chicago through the Black community where support was rallied for the strikes.
The famous case of the Scottsboro Boys in the ’30s was taken into the factories and unions. Thousands of white workers were won to this just cause against southern lynch law and to support the demand for Afro-American self-determination.
Communists in the unions are the most consistent fighters for the rights of the minority workers as well as the champions of the general workers’ struggle against the capitalists for better wages and working conditions and in the struggle for socialism. The revisionist Communist Party (CPUSA), on the other hand, stepping on the former revolutionary tradition of the party, has turned into the most thorough-going chauvinists in promoting their reformist policies and cementing their alliance with sections of the labor bureaucracy.
The revisionist betrayal can be clearly seen in the CPUSA’s attacks on the Black liberation struggle which arose within the factories during the ’60s. Groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which directly challenged the racist policies of the liberal UAW leadership, were viciously attacked by the CP leaders as being “anti-white.” In fact, this movement of mainly Black workers sparked the entire working-class struggle and directed its main blow at the companies and at the Reuther leadership, which the CP adored so much.
To eliminate the conditions which allow the intensified exploitation of all workers and build multinational unity, the trade unions must be used to win support for the demands for Afro-American self-determination in the Black Belt South, full democratic rights for all oppressed nationalities, regional autonomy for the Chicano people in the Southwest and independence for Puerto Rico. The fight for these demands will strengthen the strategic alliance between the working-class and national liberation movements.
In raising these demands, the main blow must be aimed against the agents of imperialism in the labor movement, the reformist labor leaders and the revisionists, and not at the white workers. The reformists and revisionists are the main promoters of the ideology of white supremacy and supporters of national oppression. At the same time, however, the influence of these chauvinist ideas among the white workers has been substantial.
White communists, in particular, have a special responsibility to wage a persistent and thorough-going struggle against chauvinism, winning the white workers to break with the white supremacist ideas of the imperialists on the basis of their own class interests. Through patient education, white workers will be won to fight for special demands of the minority nationalities, to champion the cause of national liberation and working-class unity.
The work of combating narrow nationalism among minority workers rests primarily on communists of those nationalities, whose task is to struggle against the petty-bourgeois influences and anti-labor line of groups like the Urban League and the NAACP reformists.
It is in this context that the need for a multinational communist party can be clearly seen.
Another basic question facing communists in the trade unions is that of “special demands.”
The fight for compensative seniority, for example, aimed at getting minority and women workers out of the last-hired, first-fired category, is crucial to building the common struggle within the unions and strengthening the workers’ confidence in each other. Of course, such affirmative action demands must be raised on the basis of the workers’ own understanding, and not in abstract, moralistic or divisive ways, such as telling white workers that they must “repudiate” their “white skin privileges.” They must be linked also to class-wide demands, like “Jobs or Income Now,” and a “short work week with no cut in pay.”
A clear example of the importance of the national question within the labor movement is the Philip Morris strike in Louisville, Kentucky. Black-white unity was broken in the strike by the appearance of anti-busing signs on the picket line. Labor aristocrats within the union were leading racist segregationist actions in the city and promoting chauvinism among white workers in the plant. Their pickets drove off support from Black workers and led to the defeat of the strike. Political questions, such as busing for school integration, were even more important to the struggle to build unity than the economic issues around which the strike developed.
The struggle around the national question also includes the demand for language rights of non-English speaking workers. The participation of these workers in battles against the company is restricted by the union bosses who refuse to translate contracts, demands, or union meetings.
Uniting the workers of all nationalities has been a hallmark of recent communist-led struggles. From the union drives in the southern textile industry, like the Oneita strike in 1973, to the caucus movement in the UAW, to such significant strikes as the one at Capitol Packaging in Chicago in 1976, communists have been working to build unity between white and minority workers and to combat the reactionary chauvinist role of the union misleaders.
In the steel industry, communists have been pressing the fight against discrimination in the coke ovens and against the racist Consent Decree. The decree, which has the staunch support of the Abel and Sadlowski machines as well as that of the revisionists, forbids minority workers to continue the struggle against discrimination in exchange for a small amount of money. It does this, asserting that discrimination no longer exists in the mills.
These examples give insight into the kind of working-class movement that must be forged under the leadership of communists and the new communist party. With such leadership, the trade unions can become storm centers for working-class struggle rather than nestling places for the chauvinist traitors of the labor aristocracy.